Milli Yium, right, reaches toward a mask she and Dr. Jackson Joe Yium, left, purchased on a trip to Equador. The Yium's have been married more than 50 years. Dr. Yium pioneered dialysis treatment in the Southeastern Tennessee area in the 1970s. More Info
Award: Lifetime Achievement Award honors health care leaders who have left a legacy on the quality and delivery of health care in Chattanooga.Winners: Dr. Jackson Yium and Dr. Michael Carr:Yium’s accomplishments: Yium was Chattanooga’s first nephrologist, providing the region’s only specialized kidney care for years and conducting the first kidney transplant at Erlanger hospital. He has been a long-tume volunteer at Porject Access and at many free clinics and charity hospitals.
For years after moving to Chattanooga in 1973, Dr. Jackson Yium and his wife Millie kept chainsaws in the trunk of their Subaru.
Late-night phone calls were a common occurrence at the Signal Mountain home of Yium, a nephrologist, and Millie, a psychologist and nurse, after they came here from Texas to launch Erlanger's hemodialysis and kidney transplant programs. The chainsaws were a precaution in case a rainstorm or snow knocked trees across the mountain's roads, giving the Yiums a tool to hack their way through the debris and down to the hospital's emergency room to promptly treat dialysis patients.
For two years after coming here in 1973, Yium was the only nephrologist [the physiology and diseases of the kidneys] in the area. Kidney patients could get some home training from Nashville's Veterans' Administration Hospital but nonveterans often went untreated.
"Kidney disease was not well understood back then, so people would not recognize the warning signs that something was wrong with their kidneys until they came to the emergency room in pain," Yium remembers.
Soon, in addition to Erlanger, he was providing dialysis at Memorial Hospital and Park Ridge Medial Center in Chattanooga and Hutcheson Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga. Yium performed the first kidney transplant at Erlanger in 1989 and was medical director of the hospital's kidney transplant program from 1989 until 2005. He performed at least 449 more while he also headed the hemodialysis unit from 1973 until 2005 and taught several generations of physicians as a faculty member of the University of Tennessee's College of Medicine in Chattanooga.
"The kidney is one of the more forgiving organs to transplant because 24 hours can elapse between the time it's removed from the donor and transplanted," Yium notes.
Pioneer spirit is in his genes. Back in 1920, his Chinese father secretly crossed the U.S.-Canadian border and made his way to Dallas, Texas where, he opened a restaurant so he could support his family.
"The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had become law in 1920 and it prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering America legally," Yium says.
Yium retired in 2013 but continues to give back to the country his father made into a home. Much of Yium's career has been spent in charity hospitals, free clinics and with impoverished patients. He and his wife now have more time to travel and to relax by their kidney-shaped swimming pool. In their home, the two-story gray rock wall flanking the foyer is decorated with masks from China, India and Africa.
"We even went back to the village in China where my father grew up; it was a ghost town," he says.
Yet Yium still donates his time as a doctor, seeing patients twice weekly at free clinics in Signal Mountain and Hixson. Millie often works beside him.
"Despite the lower income levels, a lot of patients are in fairly good health and may need to be treated for hypertension or get their prescriptions filled," she says. "But you also encounter people with untreated wounds that have become dangerous. Something as simple as a spider bite can become a serious threat if it gets infected and is left unattended. '
"We volunteered at the Remote Area Medical clinic (which treats indigent people for everything from eye to dental problems) in Dayton [Tenn.] this year," she continues. "Hundreds of people came for treatment and 120 came to us to get their blood tested. Of those, 100 had a kidney problem that required a doctor's attention."
Yium earned his medical degree from the University of Texas in Galveston in 1962 and did part of his residency at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. But when he was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in Austin, he was a journalism major.
"Then I discovered that I wasn't quite the superstar writer that I thought I could be," he says wryly. "My roommate was into pre-med and talking about his studies all the time. I thought, 'Well, medicine sounds like something I could do.' And it was.
"I found myself drawn to nephrology partly because the chemistry was so fascinating. The fact that finding and correcting imbalances of minerals, electrolytes and hormonal imbalances can have such an impact on kidneys interested me."
His colleague at Nephrology Associates, Dr. John McCarley, outlines how well Yium used that drive and curiosity.
"Dr. Yium received a Distinguished Service Award from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine for 40 years of teaching and mentoring of students, residents and faculty and significant contributions for Graduate Medical Education," McCarley said in his nomination of Yium for the Champions of Health honor.
Even after his retirement, McCarley wrote, Yium "remained active in Volunteers in Medicine as a participating physician and at the Lone Oak Medical Clinic providing needed medical care to the uninsured in Sequatchie County. Yium also was a Project Access volunteer doctor for years.
Given their dedication to the disenfranchised, it isn't surprising that the Yiums fell in love at a charity hospital in St. Louis, Washington University School of Medicine's Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Yium was a very serious young doctor doing his residency at the hospital when Millie met him at a patient's bedside.
As Millie completed some paperwork, she softly sang a little song that some med student had written about the trials of being a young doctor in residence. Yium asked her the name of the song and who wrote it. She told him it was a record that she owned; he made careful, courteous arrangements to come by her apartment to borrow it.
"I knew he just wanted to borrow it to get to know me better but I was happy to loan it to him," Millie says.
She framed the album and the record and hung it in their home's main hallway in honor of their 50th wedding anniversary.
Contact Lynda Edwards at ledwards@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6391.